Astoria: Irving's Chronicle of a Fur-Trade Venture
Washington Irving's account of John Jacob Astor's attempt to plant a trading empire beyond the Rocky Mountains — long on hardship, short on hurry.
This is a book of enterprise in the older, harder sense of the word. Its subject is a commercial venture — an attempt to establish a fur-trading settlement, Astoria, on the far side of the Rocky Mountains, backed by the merchant John Jacob Astor. But do not expect the tidy shape of a business case study. Irving sets out to tell the story of an expedition, and the expedition is mostly walking, cold, hunger, and the slow attrition of men and horses across an enormous continent.
It sits on the Business shelf, and the framing is genuinely commercial: the opening chapters trace the fur trade's whole apparatus — French Canadian rangers, licensed traders, missionaries, trading posts, and the rise of rival companies — before Astor himself enters. Yet the heart of the book is not the boardroom. It is the ground.
The texture: inventory and endurance
Irving writes as a careful accountant of suffering. He counts things. He tells you how many horses were gained by trade, how the loads were redistributed, how far the party managed to travel in a day, and what they had to eat. The effect is cumulative and, over forty chapters, genuinely wearing — which seems to be the point. When Mr. Hunt turns west from Snake River, the reckoning is exact:
His party, being augmented by the late followers of Mr. Crooks, amounted now to thirty-two white men, three Indians, and the squaw and two children of Pierre Dorion. Five jaded, half-starved horses were laden with their luggage, and, in case of need, were to furnish them with provisions.
CHAPTER XXXVII
That last clause — the horses themselves as a food reserve — is the book's tone in miniature. Prose this plain about privation does not need to raise its voice, and Irving rarely does.
The landscape gets the same unhurried, physical attention. A day's march runs "among singular hills and knolls of an indurated red earth, resembling brick," scattered with cinders and pumice. He notices the surface of the snow, whether it will bear a man's weight, what the horses can find to eat when there is nothing but "the ends of willow twigs, and the bark of the cotton-wood tree."
Who it will reward, who it will bore
This is a slow book, and it will not pretend otherwise for you. The pleasures are those of a long documentary record: the accumulation of detail, the sense of distance actually being crossed on foot, the occasional set-piece of danger. Chapter XI, with its rumour of a combined attack on the reduced garrison at Astoria and the natives quietly dropping off "until at length not an Indian was to be seen," shows Irving can build dread economically when he chooses. But such moments are spaced out across a great deal of travelogue.
- A concrete, chapter-by-chapter account of an early commercial expedition, told through logistics rather than drama
- Landscape and hardship rendered plainly and specifically, without romantic inflation
- The slow satisfaction of a journey completed against long odds — the later chapters end in rough wintry travelling, deserted camps, and at last arrival at St. Louis
It will bore the reader who wants a fast narrative, sharp characters, or the analytical shape of a modern business history. Astor, the man whose money drives everything, remains a distant figure; the foreground belongs to obscure voyageurs and hunters whose names arrive and depart with the horses.
What dates it, and what does not
What dates the book is its vantage point. It is written entirely from the traders' side, and its vocabulary and attitudes toward the Indian peoples it describes — the "one-eyed chief" Comcomly, the Crow as "Notorious Horse Stealers," the flat labelling of a man as "A Desperado of the Frontier" — belong to their period and should be read as such. The framing of the whole continent as a field for "American Enterprise" is itself a document of a particular moment.
What does not date is the physical writing. Cold, hunger, exhaustion, the arithmetic of survival on the march — Irving reports these with a steadiness that still carries. A reader in India who has never seen a North American winter will nonetheless feel the sore feet breaking through the frozen crust. This is a period book, honestly of its period, and best read as a patient chronicle rather than a story that will pull you along.
The book, free to read
More from the reading desk
Browse all →
Captain Bonneville: Irving's Fur-Trade Journal
Washington Irving digests a soldier's Rocky Mountain journal into a chronicle of trappers, rival companies and Indian camps.
Empire, Settlement, and Self-Government: A Reading List for Independence Day
Eight books from the collection, read in a line that runs from the machinery of empire to the arguments a new nation makes for itself.
Henry Graham Dakyns: The Voice of Xenophon in English
A British translator who brought the histories, dialogues and treatises of the ancient Greek writer Xenophon into readable English.
An Introduction to Oscar Wilde
A guide to the Irish playwright, poet and essayist for readers meeting his work for the first time, with a suggestion on where to begin.